autorestic

High backup level CLI utility for restic.

Autorestic is a wrapper around the amazing restic. While being amazing the restic cli can be a bit overwhelming and difficoult to manage if you have many different location that you want to backup to multiple locations. This utility is aimed at making this easier 🙂

✈️ Roadmap

I would like to make the official 1.0 release in the coming months. Until then please feel free to file issues or feature requests so that the tool is as flexible as possible :)

🌈 Features

• Config files, no CLI
• Predictable
• Backup locations to multiple backends
• Snapshot policies and pruning
• Simple interface
• Fully encrypted
• Backup & Restore docker volumes
• Seamless cron jobs for automatic backup in development.

📒 Docs

• Locations
  • Pruning & Deleting old files
  • Excluding files
  • Hooks
  • Docker volumes
• Backends
• Commands
• Examples
• QA

🛳 Installation

Linux & macOS. Windows is not supported. If you have problems installing please open an issue :)

Autorestic requires curl, wget and bzip2 to be installed. For most systems these should be already installed.

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CupCakeArmy/autorestic/master/install.sh | bash

🚀 Quickstart

⚠️ Note ⚠️

Note that the data is automatically encrypted on the server. The key will be generated and added to your config file. Every backend will have a separate key. You should keep a copy of the keys or config file somewhere in case your server dies. Otherwise DATA IS LOST!

Setup

First we need to configure our locations and backends. Simply create a .autorestic.yml either in your home directory of in the folder from which you will execute autorestic.

Optionally you can specify the location of your config file by passing it as argument: autorestic -c ../path/config.yml

locations:
  home:
    from: /home/me
    to: remote

  important:
    from: /path/to/important/stuff
    to:
      - remote
      - hdd

backends:
  remote:
    type: b2
    path: 'myBucket:backup/home'
    B2_ACCOUNT_ID: account_id
    B2_ACCOUNT_KEY: account_key

  hdd:
    type: local
    path: /mnt/my_external_storage

Then we check if everything is correct by running the check command. We will pass the -a (or --all) to tell autorestic to check all the locations.

If we would check only one location we could run the following: autorestic check -l home. Otherwise simpply check all locations with autorestic check -a

📦 Backup

autorestic backup -a

📼 Restore

autorestic restore -l home --from hdd --to /path/where/to/restore

📲 Updates

Autorestic can update itself! Super handy right? Simply run autorestic update and we will check for you if there are updates for restic and autorestic and install them if necessary.

🗂 Locations

A location simply a folder on your machine that restic will backup. The paths can be relative from the config file. A location can have multiple backends, so that the data is secured across multiple servers.

locations:
  my-location-name:
    from: path/to/backup
    to:
      - name-of-backend
      - also-backup-to-this-backend

Pruning and snapshot policies

Autorestic supports declaring snapshot policies for location to avoid keeping old snapshot around if you don't need them.

This is based on Restic's snapshots policies, and can be enabled for each location as shown below:

locations:
  etc:
    from: /etc
    to: local
    options:
      forget:
        keep-last: 5             # always keep at least 5 snapshots
        keep-hourly: 3           # keep 3 last hourly shapshots
        keep-daily: 4            # keep 4 last daily shapshots
        keep-weekly: 1           # keep 1 last weekly shapshots
        keep-monthly: 12         # keep 12 last monthly shapshots
        keep-yearly: 7           # keep 7 last yearly shapshots
        keep-within: "2w"        # keep snapshots from the last 2 weeks

Pruning can be triggered using autorestic forget -a, for all locations, or selectively with autorestic forget -l <location>. please note that contrary to the restic CLI, restic forget will call restic prune internally.

Run with the --dry-run flag to only print information about the process without actually pruning the snapshots. This is especially useful for debugging or testing policies:

$ autorestic forget -a --dry-run --verbose

Configuring Backends
local : Done ✓

Removing old shapshots according to policy
etc ▶ local : Removing old spnapshots… ⏳
etc ▶ local : Running in dry-run mode, not touching data
etc ▶ local : Forgeting old snapshots… ⏳Applying Policy: all snapshots within 2d of the newest
keep 3 snapshots:
ID        Time                 Host        Tags        Reasons    Paths
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
531b692a  2019-12-02 12:07:28  computer                within 2w  /etc
51659674  2019-12-02 12:08:46  computer                within 2w  /etc
f8f8f976  2019-12-02 12:11:08  computer                within 2w  /etc
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
3 snapshots

Excluding files/folders

If you want to exclude certain files or folders it done easily by specifiyng the right flags in the location you desire to filter. The flags are taken straight from the restic cli exclude rules.

locations:
  my-location:
    from: /data
    to:
      - local
      - remote
    options:
      backup:
        exclude:
          - '*.nope'
          - '*.abc'
        exclude-file: .gitignore

backends:
  local:
    ...
   remote:
    ...

Before / After hooks

Sometimes you might want to stop an app/db before backing up data and start the service again after the backup has completed. This is what the hooks are made for. Simply add them to your location config. You can have as many commands as you wish.

locations:
  my-location:
    from: /data
    to:
      - local
      - remote
    hooks:
      before:
        - echo "Hello"
        - echo "Human"
      after:
        - echo "kthxbye"

🐳 Docker volumes

Since version 0.13 autorestic supports docker volumes directly, without needing them to be mounted to the host filesystem.

Let see an example.

docker-compose.yml

version: '3.7'

volumes:
  data:
    name: my-data

services:
  api:
    image: alpine
    volumes:
      - data:/foo/bar

.autorestic.yml

locations:
  hello:
    from: 'volume:my-data'
    to:
      - remote
    options:
      forget:
        keep-last: 2

backends:
  remote:
    ...

Now you can backup and restore as always.

autorestic -l hello backup

autorestic -l hello restore

If the volume does not exist on restore, autorestic will create it for you and then fill it with the data.

Limitations

Unfortunately there are some limitations when backing up directly from a docker volume without mounting the volume to the host. If you are curious or have ideas how to improve this, please read more here. Any help is welcomed 🙂

1. Incremental updates are not possible right now due to how the current docker mounting works.
2. Exclude patterns and files also do not work as restic only sees a compressed tarball as source and not the actual data.

💽 Backends

Backends are the place where you data will be saved. Backups are incremental and encrypted.

Fields

type

Type of the backend see a list here

Supported are:

• Local
• Backblaze B2
• Amazon S3
• Minio
• Google Cloud Storage
• Microsoft Azure Storage

For each backend you need to specify the right variables as shown in the example below.

path

The path on the remote server. For object storages as

Example Local

backends:
  name-of-backend:
    type: local
    path: /data/my/backups

Example Backblaze

backends:
  name-of-backend:
    type: b2
    path: 'myAccount:myBucket/my/path'
    B2_ACCOUNT_ID: backblaze_account_id
    B2_ACCOUNT_KEY: backblaze_account_key

Example S3 / Minio

backends:
  name-of-backend:
    type: s3
    path: s3.amazonaws.com/bucket_name
    # Minio
    # path: http://localhost:9000/bucket_name
    AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: my_key
    AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: my_secret

Example SFTP

For SFTP to work you need to use configure your host inside of ~/.ssh/config as password prompt is not supported. For more information on this topic please see the official docs on the matter.

backends:
  name-of-backend:
    type: sftp
    path: my-host:/remote/path/on/the/server

👉 Commands

• info
• check
• backup
• forget
• restore
• exec
• intall
• uninstall
• upgrade

Info

autorestic info

Shows all the information in the config file. Usefull for a quick overview of what location backups where.

Pro tip: if it gets a bit long you can read it more easily with autorestic info | less 😉

Check

autorestic check [-b, --backend]  [-a, --all]

Checks the backends and configures them if needed. Can be applied to all with the -a flag or by specifying one or more backends with the -b or --backend flag.

Backup

autorestic backup [-l, --location] [-a, --all]

Performes a backup of all locations if the -a flag is passed. To only backup some locations pass one or more -l or --location flags.

Restore

autorestic restore [-l, --location] [--from backend] [--to <out dir>]

This will restore all the locations to the selected target. If for one location there are more than one backends specified autorestic will take the first one.

Lets see a more realistic example (from the config above)

autorestic restore -l home --from hdd --to /path/where/to/restore

This will restore the location home to the /path/where/to/restore folder and taking the data from the backend hdd

Forget

autorestic forget [-l, --location] [-a, --all] [--dry-run]

This will prune and remove old data form the backends according to the keep policy you have specified for the location

The --dry-run flag will do a dry run showing what would have been deleted, but won't touch the actual data.

Exec

autorestic exec [-b, --backend]  [-a, --all] <command> -- [native options]

This is avery handy command which enables you to run any native restic command on desired backends. An example would be listing all the snapshots of all your backends:

autorestic exec -a -- snapshots

Install

Installs both restic and autorestic

Uninstall

Uninstall both restic and autorestic

Upgrade

Upgrades both restic and autorestic automagically

🐣 Examples

List all the snapshots for all the backends

autorestic -a exec snapshots

Unlock a locked repository

⚠️ Only do this if you know what you are doing. E.g. if you accidentally cancelled a running operation

autorestic -b my-backend exec unlock

❓ QA

My config file was moved?

This happens when autorestic needs to write to the config file. This happend e.g. when we are generating a key for you. Unforunately during this process formatting and comments are lost. That is why autorestic will place a copy of your old config next to the one we are writing to.

Contributors

This amazing people helped the project!

• @ChanceM [Docs]
• @EliotBerriot [Docs, Pruning, S3]